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A little explanation: we English have told Irish jokes for generations. In very much the same way that the Swedes do about the Norwegians, Americans used to about Poles and the Irish themselves do about those from County Kerry. Indeed, they're often the very same jokes.

It's also considered really not really on these days to tell such jokes which portray the Irish (or Poles, Weegies or Kerrymen) as dumb rural hicks just to get a cheap laugh. But then a group of Irishmen do something so absurd as to make it almost impossible not to mention this background.

The National Newspapers of Ireland (NNI) has decided in its collective wisdom that a simple link to one of their pages is the use of copyright material. A use which must be paid for. 1-5 links (and yes, it really is links, not just extracts or excerpts) should be charged at €300 ($400 or so).

You can see the general view of this over on slashdot. And the source of the story is here:

This year the Irish newspaper industry asserted, first tentatively and then without any equivocation, that links -just bare links like this one- belonged to them. They said that they had the right to be paid to be linked to. They said they had the right to set the rates for those links, as they had set rates in the past for other forms of licensing of their intellectual property. And then they started a campaign to lobby for unauthorised linking to be outlawed.

Yes, really. If I provide a link to a newspaper page then a couple of things happen. That newspaper will now rank more highly in Google's results, leading to more traffic for it (obviously, this will be infinitesimal from a minor personal blog, and could be significant from a site like this at Forbes). It will also drive some amount of traffic to that page (ditto with size of effect) from which the newspaper will earn more money from advertising. Yet the argument is that by my making them money I should pay them.

I tend to think that this is a proposal that's going to fail. At least I hope it will. But it might make Irish jokes fashionable once again.

Update: The Evening Herald has been in touch to discuss my "allegedly racist" piece here. Obviously no one will be able to send me a link to whatever they say because this is a commercial site and thus we would have to send them money. They also sent me the NNI document responding to McGarr's original accusations. Which contains this:

NNI made a submission to the effect that our view of existing legislation is that the display and transmission of links does constitute an infringement of copyright and our existing copyright law should not be amended in the manner discussed in the Consultation Paper.

Yes, they do think that the link itself, not the quote or extract, but the link itself, is a breach of their copyright.

My supposition is that they're setting themselves up for a battle with Google. I don't know this, it's a supposition only.

Take the example of the French newspapers which I discuss here. Google and Google News send a lot of traffic to the French newspaper websites. Something like 30-40% of their entire traffic. Which of course the newspapers make good money out of: anyone viewing a page will be shown ads and those ads make money. But the French newspapers are demanding that Google should pay the newspapers for the privilege of sending traffic to them.

It gets worse though from my point of view. My point of view being to try and think about the money here.

Because 30 percent to 40 percent of the traffic on French news sites comes from Google’s links, the company’s threat is

not an idle one.

That’s a very large part of the French newspapers ability to make money coming from Google there.

Total Internet ad sales at French newspaper and magazine sites is about €150 million, or $194 million, a year, Ms. Collin said.

So the newspapers are making (not quite true as search engine traffic is less valuable than repeat readers but let’s run with it) $60 to $80 million a year out of Google. And they’re complaining and insisting that Google must pay them for the right to abuse them so badly?

Yes, yes, I know, we shouldn’t bandy around accusations of mental ill health but please can anyone come up with a better description of this behaviour than insanity?

And what's really annoying about this is that they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. For if they don't want the Google traffic then all they've got to do is change their robots.txt file and the Google Bot won't index those pages. That they haven't changed the file shows that they want the traffic. But then they seem to want Google to pay them for what they want Google to do anyway.

As I say, my supposition is that the Irish newspapers are trying to set themselves up so that they've a cast iron legal case to charge Google for indexing their sites. That Google which is already a major source of their traffic and from which they already make money.

I agree that I could be wrong here. But if I'm right then someone, somewhere, does have to start making jokes about it, don't they?